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Comment by sdoering | Hacker News Reader

Wow. Had just read that and then saw the feature first time while browsing over a list page. Was moving my curser down the list and when ever I wanted to click a link, the above link hat popped up the layer, highjacking my click and leading me to the wrong page.

What a great way of destroying the user experience with a beautifully over-engineered feature that is utterly crap while actually trying to use the underlying page.

Thanks an awful lot for breaking the ability to use the site as I am used to and making it impossible to scan with the curser as anchor for my eyes.

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"a [...] over-engineered feature that is utterly crap"

I'm not usually trying to police this kind of thing, but is there a way you could have phrased this without discrediting the work of a lot of people whose goal is to help others? I'm sure you'd get both a little bit hurt inside and defensive when someone in your team calls your code "utterly crap."

That said, I'm very sure they will be happy to hear about your feedback.

As someone who works on the team that built this feature, thank you for saying this.

As for feedback, we've had 4 years of it and welcome more. Check out the FAQ and if you have something constructive to say, leave a note on the talk page.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews#FAQ

If the Wikimedia Foundation's goal was to help people, their time and money would be much better spent hiring professional / full-time editors to QC their content. Features like this hovering preview are peripheral to their goal of providing quality content that can also be updated by the general public

I have a habit to select some text in a page when I'm reading it. And I hate websites that trying to immediately interact with me when I'm selecting a text (usually it's "fix a typo" or something similar).

Same here. I hate even more website where you can't select the text.

Hate is a pretty strong word and kind of irrational.

Textselection was probably not intended as reading aid, so don't be disappointed if it is abused to actually, you know, select text to do something with it.

I agree, user scripts can be presumptuous and what not. I used to read with text selection the same way, and even reacted repulsed at advertisement hover pop-ups. But somehow I don't do it anymore, so I don't care as much.

At least you seem to be able to disable them, click the cog in the corner of the card :)

Have you tried this in a more text based article? I was reading through something lengthy last night and I thought these pop ups were a lifesaver. They're like a TL;DR, you can avoid the context switch of actually clicking through. Sometimes even just the picture was enough to go "oh ok!".

Also personally I'm prone to going down a wikipedia rabbit hole and if last night was any indication, I think these popups will help stop that.

Sounds like you hit an edge case. Personally in that situation of a list of links I would just move the cursor outside the list. For me at least a minor change in behavior in some edge cases is worth what is otherwise a really awesome new feature.

You’re welcome.

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